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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
S. C. Xiao, Z. Zhou, Jing Zhao, Y. Yang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 592-598
Nuclear Systems: Analysis and Experiments | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 2) Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-582
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, a light water cooled fusion-fission hybrid reactor blanket fueled with thorium and uranium is presented. The major objective is to study the feasibility of this new concept with multi-purposes, including high energy gain, tritium self sufficiency and 233U breeding. The basic logic of this concept is to use the excess neutrons generated in the natural uranium fuel region to breed 233U in the thorium fuel region, while maintaining high energy amplifying factor (M) and tritium self-sufficiency. The guiding principle for the blanket design is to obtain a good neutron economy. The main method is to maximize the available neutrons and optimally distribute them in the blanket via competing processes of fission, tritium breeding and fissile fuel breeding by adjusting the neutron spectrum and system geometry. The COUPLE code developed by INET of Tsinghua University is used to simulate the neutronic behavior in the blanket. The simulation results show that a combined soft and hard neutron spectrum could yield M>15 while maintaining TBR>1.10 and conversion ratio of fissile materials (including 239Pu and 233U) CR>1.0 in a reasonably long refueling cycle (about 5 years). The results also demonstrates that under the constraint condition of tritium self sufficiency, this water cooled concept can only reach one optimized purpose at one time, energy gain M or 233U breeding.